Sasha Frere-Jones at The Nation:
To write about Lou Reed is to fight with Lou Reed. It is difficult to say, however, who started what, and there is more than a little evidence that the sourness of rock males and their broadsheets were a somewhat common culprit. It feels inaccurate to blame any single party (even Jann Wenner). In 2018, Hat and Beard Press released My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters With Lou Reed, a collection of 36 tussles that range in character from amicable slap-boxing to tearful negotiations. Sometimes Reed is responding in nasty bad faith when being asked anodyne questions about his Poe adaptation; other times, he’s fielding provocative tabloid nonsense about the “greasers” who “get off” to his music. It’s a bad soup. Howard Sounes, who published The Life of Lou Reed: Notes from the Velvet Underground in 2019, told me over the phone recently that “the problem isn’t with the journalists; the problem is with him.” Sounes never had the chance to interview Reed, who died in 2013, but among the people who knew him, Sounes noted, “the word that kept coming up was ‘prick.’”
more here.